"What's happening in Wisconsin is not complicated. At the beginning of this year, the state was on course to end 2011 with a budget surplus of $120 million. As Ezra Klein explained, newly elected GOP Governor Scott Walker then " signed two business tax breaks and a conservative health-care policy experiment that lowers overall tax revenues (among other things). The new legislation was not offset, and it turned a surplus into a deficit." Walker then used the deficit he'd created as the justification for assaulting his state's public employees. He used a law cooked up by a right-wing advocacy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC likes to fly beneath the radar, but I described the organization in a 2005 article as "the connective tissue that links state legislators with right-wing think tanks, leading anti-tax activists and corporate money." Similar laws are on the table in Ohio and Indiana. Walker's bill would strip public employees of the right to bargain collectively for anything but higher pay (and would cap the amount of wage hikes they might end up gaining in negotiations). His intentions are clear -- before assuming office, Walker threatened to decertify the state's employees' unions (until he discovered that the governor doesn't have that power)." http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/479560/12_things_you_need_to_kn... _______ Aso worth reading: http://prop-press.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/report-from-day-five-first-chance... ________________________________________________________________________ I think the time is here to start talking with people about http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Political_Principles_of_Peer-to-Peer_Advocacy here, in the Industrial Midwest (which includes WI) One simple way to route around party politics is to give people a direct p2p way to actively reflect existing poltics as we saw in iceland with http://skuggathing.is/portal based on https://github.com/rbjarnason/open-active-democracy Another parallel approach is to start applying collective decision making and pooling of resources directly to problems people are addressing. In addition, creating cooperatives, supporting alternative currencies when appropriate. Unions in all of these states have resources, including pension funds, that they could invest directly in worker-owned cooperative companies, as has been discussed by Richard Schulte of flywheeltechcollective in the past. Some of them have expressed interest in doing this. These kinds of changes for entities like unions are long term changes and investments, and will take time. However, I think every year that goes by makes more and more on the left receptive to p2p alternatives. If people are interested in working on P2P political advocacy and approaches in 2011-2012, let's talk here and continue to build towards thing people can really use in places like Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Eastern Europe, South America, etc -- -- Sam Rose Future Forward Institute and Forward Foundation Tel:+1(517) 639-1552 Cel: +1-(517)-974-6451 skype: samuelrose email: [email protected] http://forwardfound.org http://futureforwardinstitute.org http://hollymeadcapital.com http://p2pfoundation.net http://socialmediaclassroom.com "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." - Carl Sagan